D & B Fasteners has a long tradition of being the leaders in Industrial Fasteners for over four decades. Our products are used in domestic sectors such as furniture making and repair, home improvement, office buildings, manufacturing facility buildings as well as in highly demanding industries such as chemical process equipment, oil & gas exploration and drilling, special purpose machinery, aerospace and defense.
D & B supplies fasteners for all standard and specialty applications. While standard applications are well known, the specialty use cases are not that well known and hence worth a look at. If you have any similar applications, contact us to get a custom solution.
Use Case 1: CRITICAL Heat Exchanger
Captive Coal fired Power plants are found in a lot of large chemical manufacturing complexes. Typically they are combined cycle power plants, which means that they generate electricity as well as steam. These are used captively in the chemical manufacturing complex. The coal is fed to a furnace with a boiler. Superheated steam is generated in the boiler, which is then used to drive turbines connected to alternators, that generate electrical power. The waste heat from the turbine also flows to a steam driven pump, that is used to pump cooling water to the plant. These installations, use a lot of heat exchangers of various capacities and materials. Some of these heat exchangers are large, extremely critical and difficult to replace immediately in case of trouble. (Smaller heat exchangers can be replaced fairly quickly, within a day or two). The heat exchanger tubes are generally welded to the shell at two points. However due to the corrosive nature of the acidic coal wash water, which is often recycled, these welding joints can break, leading to breakage of the tubes and ingress of water into the steam side. In one of our customer’s plants, these incidents occurred twice. A HAZOP Study (short for Hazard and Operability Study) that was carried out after the incident, recommended an additional independent method to fasten the tubes to the shell. D & B successfully supplied our special Titanium coated fasteners for this application. The success of this system has led many other power plants to do the same.
If you are interested in applying this technology to your plant, please contact us.
USE CASE 2: GLASS LINED REACTORS
Glass Lined Reactors are used in extremely corrosive applications, in which no metal will survive in case of rapid corrosion. In such cases, use of glass lined vessels such as reactors is common. However, the fasteners that are used in various components and accessories of the glass lined equipment, have to be also corrosion resistant, as well as not too hard enough to break the glass lining/coating while tightening the joints. In these cases our special purpose PTFE coated fasteners can be used. This material is coated with a specially developed PTFE like coating, that is soft enough not to break the glass coating, as well as being highly corrosion resistant. This ca enhance the life of your glass lined equipment significantly. Contact us for more details of this product range.